Rubik's Cube in popular culture

Cosplay as a Rubik's Cube at Lucca Comics and Games (2008)

The Rubik's Cube, a mid-1970s invention of Ernő Rubik of Hungary, fascinated people around the globe and became one of the most popular games in America at the time. In just seven years worldwide sales surpassed thirty million units with a senior buyer at the New York FAO Schwarz toy emporium noting it had become "the world's most asked-for plaything". Some even argued it could lead to obsessive behavior. Pirated editions turned up in Taiwan, Hong Kong and some American cities. The cube spawned an array of sequels, spinoffs, a television show and literary works. As of January 2009 350 million cubes have sold worldwide making it the world's top-selling puzzle game. It earned a place as a permanent exhibit in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and entered the Oxford English Dictionary after just two years. The Cube retains a dedicated following, with almost 40,000 entries on YouTube featuring tutorials and video clips of quick solutions.

Movies and Television

The ability to solve a Rubik's Cube quickly is often used a way of establishing a character's high intelligence.^{[citation needed]} The films Brick, Armageddon, Nói the Albino, The Pursuit of Happyness, Dude, Where's My Car?, Wall-E, Let the Right One In, Let Me In, My Name is Khan, 3 Idiots and Karthik Calling Karthik and the TV shows The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Seinfeld, Doctor Who , Everybody Hates Chris and The Simpsons include sequences which depict this.

Characters are frustrated by the Cube in the films UHF, Being John Malkovich, The Wedding Singer and Hellboy.

Rubik, the Amazing Cube was a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon series where the main character was a sentient Rubik's Cube.

The building blocks of the alien spacecraft in Super 8 are compared to Rubik's Cubes. Some viewers see this as an anachronism since the film takes place in 1979, a year before the release of the toy in the US.

Music video

The famous cube appears in Spice Girls - Viva Forever music video.

Music

A promotional rubix cube featuring the four Julian Opie portraits of the band members of Blur was released in 2000 in promotion for the Blur: The Best of album (which also features the portraits on the cover)

Art

Large Rubik's Cube built on the University of Michigan's North Campus

Probably from the earliest days of the Rubik's Cube craze in the 1980s people have assembled cubes to form simple art pieces, several early 'Folk Artists' are noted for their work. Rubik’s cubes have also been the subject of several pop art installations. Owing to their popularity as a children’s toy several artists and groups have created large Rubik’s cubes.

Tony Rosenthal's Alamo ("The Astor Cube") is a spinnable statue of a Cube standing in New York City. Once the cube was covered with colored panels so that it resembled a Rubik's Cube. Similarly, the University of Michigan students covered Endover creating a large Rubik’s cube on the University of Michigan’s central campus for April fool’s day in 2008. In conjunction with the 2008 April fool’s day cube covering, a student group created a large rotating non-functional Rubik’s cube for the University of Michigan's North Campus. Built out of 600+ lbs. of steel, the cube was an entertaining addition to North Campus. Removed later the same semester, the cube reappeared in the fall of 2008 on the first day of classes. It was later removed, but in response to the cube, the university is planning on a permanent Rubik's Cube art installation on North Campus. Oversized Cube installations with staircases in them are found outside the 1980s-themed buildings of Disney's Pop Century Resort.

Rubik's Cubism

Beyond the Folk Art of the 1980s and 1990s, and the simple replication of a Rubik's Cube in oversized form, artists have developed a pointillist art style using the cubes. Rubik's Cube Art a.k.a Rubik's Cubism or RubikCubism makes use of a standard Rubik’s Cube, a popular puzzle toy of the 1980s. The earliest simple forms of the art probably occurred with independent “cubers” even in the first years after the cube became popular.^{[citation needed]}

The earliest recorded artworks appear to have been created by Fred Holly, a legally blind man in his 60s in the mid-1980s. These early pieces focus on geometrics and color patterns. There does not appear to be other recorded art pieces until the mid-1990s by cube aficionados involved in the puzzle and game industry.

The Folk art form reached another level of its evolution with the development and maturity into a Pop art form consisting of pointillist Cube Art renderings. The street artist who uses the alias "Space Invader' or "Invader" started exhibiting pointillist pieces, including one of a man behind a desk and Mario Bros, using Rubik's Cube in June 2005 in an exhibition named 'Rubik Cubism' at Sixspace in Los Angeles. Prior to this exhibition the artist had used Rubik's Cubes to create giant Space Invaders.. Another artist includes Robbie Mackinnon of Toronto Canada with earliest published work in 2007 who claims to have developed his pointillist Cube Art years earlier while being a teacher in China. Robbie Mackinnon's work has been exhibited in Ripley's Believe it or Not and focussed on using pop-art, while Space Invader has exhibited his Cube Art alongside mosaic Space Invaders in commercial and public galleries.

Pete Fecteau's "Dream Big" piece in the making.

In 2010 artist Pete Fecteau created "Dream Big", a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. using 4,242 officially licensed Rubik's Cubes. Fecteau also worked with the organization You Can Do The Rubik's Cube to create two separate guides designed to teach school children how to create Rubik's Cube mosaics from templates which he also created.

Politics

The People's Cube website uses an entirely red cube as its logo to satirize political correctness. A single color cube can never be scrambled, thus it requires no intelligence to solve and excludes no-one. The same concept, but from the other side of the political spectrum, is used for the novelty toy "The Executive Cube".

External links

• Tony Rosenthal's Alamo as a Rubik's Cube All too flat
• The People's Cube